Comfort in a Bowl

What do you have in common with a lab rat that has spent five days in a refrigerated cage? More than you might think. Rats, like people, are prone to stress. No, they don't have to contend with deadlines or traffic jams, but when temperatures fall, their bodies exhibit classic signs of chronic stress. Indeed, several experiments performed by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, show that if the animals have access to sugary water and lard, they will forgo their normal, nutritious rat chow and load up on sweets and fats.

Sound familiar? From a biochemical point of view, the rats' choice of comfort food looks a lot like the cookies, ice cream and macaroni and cheese to which stressed-out people often turn. Just as you would expect, the rats gained weight, particularly around their abdomens.

What's especially compelling about the UCSF research, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that it suggests that the extra girth can actually have a calming effect on the brain. Something in the abdominal fat — the researchers aren't sure what — seems to lower the rats' production of cortisol and other stress hormones. "This is absolutely a working hypothesis," says Mary Dallman, the neuroscientist who led the UCSF experiments. "But everything we see says there's a feedback from the belly fat to the brain."

Of course, packing on the pounds is no way to stay healthy over the long run. But you can dodge your body's natural tendencies. For starters, you can stop beating yourself up over your eating habits. "Eating is not evil," says Martin Binks, director of health psychology for the Duke Diet and Fitness Center. "Sometimes eating a small amount of food is a useful coping mechanism." But if you can't stop with just one cookie, try to find other ways to relieve the tension, like taking a walk, jumping into the shower or simply breathing deeply for a few minutes.